Claude Simon has not reached the magnitude of Butor or Robbe-Grillet, despite the fact that his last two books, Le Vent and L'Herbe, were generally praised by the critics and translated [widely]…. There is no doubt that his technique is not as geometrically defined as Robbe-Grillet's, nor has he invented a gimmick as striking as that of Butor's La Modification, nor can any one of his works be summed up in a term as clear-cut as that of "subconversation," used to describe Nathalie Sarraute's Le Planétarium.

At the same time, Simon's dense pages might well discourage those readers used to the liberal paragraphing of Françoise Sagan and the popular novelists à l'Américaine. His paragraphs often run to twelve pages or more, his sentences may continue on for three pages. Within his sentences, ordinary syntax is not respected, subordinate clauses and parentheses abound, the subject or main clause gets lost on the way. And even when the sentence finally falls back on its feet, the reader's grammatical memory is too short and his attention too often distracted for him to realize it. Even more disturbing to the French reader is the fact that all the rules of good style, as it is taught in school, are rejected: parentheses within parentheses, cascades of "que"s, conjunctions, and adverbs, occasional cacophony, an overabundance of present participles. (pp. 101-02)

Claude Simon has something to say and, without bothering about established rules, has developed the necessary technique and style for saying it the best way possible. Were he to write differently, he would say it badly or would say something else. Which is in fact somewhat the case with his first novel, Le Tricheur. There he used prefabricated techniques: the stream of consciousness and pointillism, as developed by the American novel, resulting in that mixture of Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck in translation so popular with young French writers in the 1940's. The technique emphasized a story which in itself is not terribly interesting. Simon's real "message" came through more by way of the book's failings than in its better pages. (p. 102)

By the time Simon's Le Vent was published,… [he] had developed along his own lines. Le Vent tells a story, a story objectively stated and without ambiguity…. There are many traditional elements of the novel on provincial life … and the populist novel …: a traditional naturalist foundation with a plot which unfolds in time and three-dimensional characters. As a "mirror of life," combined with suspense, it might well recall the content of a Georges Simenon novel.

But what matters in Le Vent is the way in which the story is told, giving it not only its meaning but determining its nature. Le Vent answers the question: What is the nature of a story that might be used as the subject of a novel? The title itself gives a double explanatory metaphor: Le Vent, Tentative de Restitution d'un Retable baroque. Several times in the novel, events, scenes, the coming and going of characters are compared to certain Spanish dramas, to the torment of baroque theatre, to its paroxysms and finally useless acts of extravagance, whose flow and rich mixture of noises, colors, movements are in fact life…. The story, or rather the reconstruction of a story, fades out of itself, because many of the characters are dead, others have disappeared. Although the hero and a few others continue to live, the story is ended—the story, that is, a certain arrangement of beings and things, a certain series of situations, a structure with its own passing existence. The structure is rather similar to a cloud, formed by the wind, which at a given moment takes on a recognizable—or at least noticeable—shape, then changes into another, and perhaps still another, finally becoming shapeless, lost in the greyness of a clouded sky. (pp. 102-03)

On the surface, Claude Simon tells us nothing very new. His attitude towards many things is common to the nonmilitant Left: he criticizes a certain bourgeoisie, rebels against poverty, has contempt for cowards, emphasizes the stupid brutality of the police, is anti-clerical, and refuses religion. Such, as it were, is his ethical world. But the novel has no political or social message; its vision is metaphysical. Claude Simon is hungry for reality, a concrete reality, the raw material of experience, which he tries to reconstruct in both its fixity and its fluidity in (or with) the space-time which is its form and flesh.

There is no question but that such an attempt calls for the use of the senses, and above all, that of sight. Whereas Robbe-Grillet sees like a draftsman or a surveyor, Simon has the vision of a painter, a sincere painter, a painter who refuses to fake. (p. 104)

[Simon's works] can be considered as a searching attempt at re-learning to see the world. And the process of seeing is indeed complicated. It implies love for the object seen. It consists in apprehending not only the present thing (or form, Gestalt), but in a different mode and simultaneously, its absent or possible counterparts. It does not mean establishing a distinction between the thing seen and the person who sees, but on the contrary means grasping the synthesis of the two in space and time. For the novelist, the same process is necessary in respect to all the senses and results in a constantly moving, protoplasmic fusion…. Fusions, fluid and approximate comparisons, projections in time …, all contribute to closing in upon that undoubtedly concrete essence—present, one might even say tangible—called Reality. In that sense, Simon's device is poetic, in much the same way as Proust's. (p. 105)

On the one hand, rejecting "trucage" and trying to attain the fluid reality of life results in a reevaluation of fictional psychology and the principle of the coherence of characters. The linear, determinist, and mechanical links within a consciousness, the rational relation of cause and effect in the forming of decisions and their transformation into acts, a clear distinction between the outer world and the inner world are all considered to be conventions, "une merveilleuse illusion;" a coheren character in the traditional sense is false. A character is a presence, he flexibly participates in the moving forms from which he is inseparable, he is the point at which inner and outer forces meet in ever-changing combinations.

On the other hand, Simon's vision leads to a new way of writing which is both a means of reconstructing reality and of exploring it. In the long sentences, similar to a series of deep pulsations, of organic waves, the most striking features are: (1) A superabundance of logical tools such as "donc," "de sorte que," etc., but stripped of their normal functions, emphasizing the desperate effort of reason to affirm order, actually the debris of reason's defeat—for what really binds the sentences is internal, somehow independent of such words. (2) A superabundance of comparisons, made up of terms which do not exactly coincide, introduced by "un peu comme," "à peu près comme," continued by other comparisons beginning with "ou plutôt comme," completed by what might be called attempts at comparisons, rejected in the formula "non pas comme …". The very style makes the substance of life appear both homogeneous and diversified, never allowing the mind to establish fixed and exact relationships. (3) A superabundance of present participles, replacing clauses which in any normal style would be in the past definite. Hence acts and gestures are grasped while happening and not as completed. The imperfect tense can produce a similar effect, but the advantage of the present participle is that on the one hand it does not create the expectation of a decisive act (in the past definite) and is not relative but brutally absolute; on the other, it makes the action expressed by the verb into an act separate from the subject and at the same time a quality (momentary) of the subject, a protoplasmic excrescence of it.

The third device is particularly striking in L'Herbe, a less adventurous novel than Le Vent, but even more rigorous. The story is reduced to a minimum, with the concentration of life forming around a dying old maid. Whereas in Le Vent the character-viewpoint is a local professor who by chance hears both the central character's testimony and that of a lawyer and tries to reconstruct the pattern using the information he has gathered plus his imagination, in L'Herbe the central character is a determining factor in the life of the character-viewpoint. (pp. 105-06)

Here, more than in the didactic remarks of Le Tricheur, more than in the criminal adventure of Le Vent, the style itself—the irresistible pulsation of the whole—brings out a conception of life, of space-time, of the gravitation and modification of individuals. From one end to the other, the present participles are colored blades of indeterminate length and transparent, under which other blades appear, then still others. And it is precisely that which makes the story. Simon, in an experiment similar to Butor's, has tried to grasp and reconstruct not only the passing of time in its irregular flow but the direct experience of it—not linear but, rather, voluminous. (p. 106)

What Simon finally tries to do is to render living experience present to the reader. The constantly moving presence of motion picture images (to which he makes numerous allusions) would seem to have had a strong influence on his style…. Simon uses the very essence of the motion picture: the presence of an unpredictable continuum (adding to it the possibility, given by the written word, of a permanent simultaneity of the inner and outer worlds). His style in L'Herbe is one possible solution to the problem originally stated by Sartre in La Nausée and a constant concern to French novelists ever since; that of recapturing the here and now of a story. In fact it is the subject of his novel.

Doubtless certain pages are confused or dreary. Simon does not always succeed, and in wanting to too faithfully reproduce the repetitions and boredom of reality, he becomes repetitive and boring. Also, his technique is sometimes too obvious…. The merit of Simon's system is that instead of being limited to one level of reality, like Nathalie Sarraute's in Le Planétarium, or to a problem of the relation with a world of objects, like Robbe-Grillet's, it is or tries to be all-embracing. (p. 107)